Music is language, the booklet says, and beyond that a gift and a store for images, situations and memories. Gifts of just this kind run through the album: dedications, hommages, in memoriams. Their advocates are two many-stringed instruments — the campanula, a bowed instrument with resonating strings, and the harp. Michael Denhoff, cellist and composer, has played the campanula since its earliest years, and in the works for two instruments Ute Blaumer is his partner on the harp.
At the beginning stands Günter Bialas’s Album Leaf GS of 1985, written for the seventieth birthday of the music teacher Gotthard Speer, who like Bialas was born in Silesia. The Silesian folk song “Und in dem Schneegebirge” shimmers through the piece again and again, often in rapt harmonics. For Denhoff, Bialas was one of his first mentors — never an official teacher, but from their first meeting, when Denhoff was thirteen, something like a teacher-pupil relationship that later became a friendship. The Album Leaf was also the very first work Denhoff premiered on the newly invented campanula in 1985, with Bialas’s express consent.
The largest part of the programme consists of thirteen numbers from Denhoff’s Strophen – das Melodienprojekt Op. 107 of 2009. Many of these strophes are intended for particular people, characterise them or are meant to speak to them; the titles name Clara, Béla Bartok and György Kurtag, Morton Feldman, Erik Satie, Danjulo Ishizaka. Denhoff’s fascination with the artistic miniature also shows in his engagement with the haiku. From the same inclination come the Eight Intermezzi Op. 112 for Campanula and Harp of 2014, which he himself calls “eight sketchy miniatures”. Between them stand the Sarabande from Bach’s Suite No. 2 in D minor BWV 1008 and three pieces from György Kurtag’s open collection Signs, Games and Messages, whose concise, intense forms have long linked Denhoff to the composer.
Torben Maiwald, who names Denhoff and Kurtag as models of his youth, wrote An Wesen in 2006 for solo cello — a quiet, almost meditative monologue. When Denhoff played the piece to him on the campanula, Maiwald was so fascinated by the “magical instrument” that in 2010 he acquired a campanula himself. Heinz Albert Heindrichs, composer and poet, based his Atem für Atem of 2002 on his own poem of that name. The disc closes with Inner minds Op. 117 for Campanula and Playback (2017): three sketches after the last sculptures of Wolfgang Überhorst, first shown in 2017 at the Lindau gallery Skulpturale, which occupied Denhoff visually, emotionally and physically.